(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2020]

[Dormouse559]

Old common's phonology has [a]. But, fronting this [ɑu̯] to [ay̑] would bring the sound to [ɑː] in Middle Common due to an already finalized sound change. They'd see it as a partially cyclic chance, which they don't like, because of the non-syllabic back vowel. The idea is having this merge back into its parent sound, [ɑu̯], as [æ̰ː] in Middle Common.

I can't help you if your conpeople don't like the sound changes you make for them. But I will say that [ɑu̯] doesn't have to front at all. It just can. [ɑ] is the only unrounded back vowel in Proto-Common, and it could behave differently from the rounded back vowels by, for example, simply staying put.

[yangfiretiger121]

Old common's phonology has [a]. But, fronting this [ɑu̯] to [ay̑] would bring the sound to [ɑː] in Middle Common due to an already finalized sound change. They'd see it as a partially cyclic chance, which they don't like, because of the non-syllabic back vowel. The idea is having this merge back into its parent sound, [ɑu̯], as [æ̰ː] in Middle Common.

I can't help you if your conpeople don't like the sound changes you make for them. But I will say that [ɑu̯] doesn't have to front at all. It just can. [ɑ] is the only unrounded back vowel in Proto-Common, and it could behave differently from the rounded back vowels by, for example, simply staying put.

[ɑ]'s Proto-Common's only back undrounded vowel, just as [y]'s its only front rounded vowel. I included [ɑu̯] in the question because of the [u̯] and, then, misunderstood the post you made before the one I'm answering now. Length doesn't come into play until Middle Common's monophthongization process. At that point, [a, ɑ → ɑ, æ̰] have already happened and {ɑɪ̯, ɑu̯ → æ̰ː} happens. It looks like [ɑu̯] becomes [pɑu̯~pʰɑu̯]. I may leave the aspirants derived from [*Cʝ] as separate phonemes from the tenuis plosives.

[Vlürch]

How can you force yourself to get motivated to come up with uninteresting vocabulary?

For the vaguely Ural-Altaic conlang written in Chinese characters, I already have more words than most of my conlangs, but it's still missing a lot of words for "boring" but absolutely necessary things. I can't even pinpoint most of the mundane-and-obvious words that it's missing, but I know they're missing... and I'd prefer to have as much of the necessary vocabulary down before I post the conlang here, especially since it's already my most "complete" conlang so far, so lacking words that should be among the first would be kinda weird.

[sangi39]

How can you force yourself to get motivated to come up with uninteresting vocabulary?

For the vaguely Ural-Altaic conlang written in Chinese characters, I already have more words than most of my conlangs, but it's still missing a lot of words for "boring" but absolutely necessary things. I can't even pinpoint most of the mundane-and-obvious words that it's missing, but I know they're missing... and I'd prefer to have as much of the necessary vocabulary down before I post the conlang here, especially since it's already my most "complete" conlang so far, so lacking words that should be among the first would be kinda weird.

Like pronouns, adpositions, kinship terms, words for geographical features, common animals and materials, basic verbs, and stuff?

[Nloki]

Would there be any way to combine animacy-based split-ergative and Austronesian alignments? More specifically, like a combination of Biblaridion's Nekāchti and Tagalog alignments.
It might be a mess since the reason I'm asking here is the fact I can't imagine how is that hypothetic alignment supposed to work, and perhaps even unnaturalistic, but I just wanted to figure out if it was even possible and, if so, likely to be featured on a naturalistic conlang.

[Jackk]

How can you force yourself to get motivated to come up with uninteresting vocabulary?

translate translate translate

I can't recommend enough just translating fun sentences you come across.

[Vlürch]

Like pronouns, adpositions, kinship terms, words for geographical features, common animals and materials, basic verbs, and stuff?

Mostly stuff like furniture and whatever, but yeah, some geographical features and whatnot too. I think I have all the necessary pronouns and most kinship terms (some even with several synonyms), as well as important animals (there are like a dozen terms for different types of horses lol), but yeah, some basic verbs are probably still missing too and so are a lot of anatomical terms. Part of the problem is indecisiveness, like whether some of the really basic words should be Uralic or Altaic or even just totally a priori. Obviously there isn't an objective answer to that, but that's part of why I keep procrastinating the derivation of "boring" vocabulary; it's not interesting, and if the words ended up uninteresting, it could easily make the entire language less interesting.

Yeah, it's such a non-issue that I should just get over it, but I don't know how. This is how so many of my otherwise pretty good conlangs end up scrapped. I'd rather not scrap this one like I did the Tibeto-Altaic one over this exact same problem (except with that one it happened very early on)...

translate translate translate

I can't recommend enough just translating fun sentences you come across.

Hmm... I tend to prefer coming up with sentences to demonstrate something about the language's grammar rather than by translating something, but I'll give that a shot anyway. Thanks!

[sangi39]

Like pronouns, adpositions, kinship terms, words for geographical features, common animals and materials, basic verbs, and stuff?

Mostly stuff like furniture and whatever, but yeah, some geographical features and whatnot too. I think I have all the necessary pronouns and most kinship terms (some even with several synonyms), as well as important animals (there are like a dozen terms for different types of horses lol), but yeah, some basic verbs are probably still missing too and so are a lot of anatomical terms. Part of the problem is indecisiveness, like whether some of the really basic words should be Uralic or Altaic or even just totally a priori. Obviously there isn't an objective answer to that, but that's part of why I keep procrastinating the derivation of "boring" vocabulary; it's not interesting, and if the words ended up uninteresting, it could easily make the entire language less interesting.

Yeah, it's such a non-issue that I should just get over it, but I don't know how. This is how so many of my otherwise pretty good conlangs end up scrapped. I'd rather not scrap this one like I did the Tibeto-Altaic one over this exact same problem (except with that one it happened very early on)...

translate translate translate

I can't recommend enough just translating fun sentences you come across.

Hmm... I tend to prefer coming up with sentences to demonstrate something about the language's grammar rather than by translating something, but I'll give that a shot anyway. Thanks!

Ohhh, that makes sense.

I guess, as Jackk suggested, do some translating. Start simple (kids' books and the like), and work your way up. That'll give you an idea of what gaps you've got going on. And what you could do is, since you want etymologies, is come up with multiple words, at least one from each source (Altaic or Uralic) and see which one you like most.

[gestaltist]

Translating is great advice. I'd like to add my approach which might inspire you. I treat the lexicon much the same way I treat phonology or any other part of the language: as an exercise in diachronics. I start from a Proto stage, coining roots for various things, and some derivational affixes. Then I'm combining them and thinking about fun semantic shifts. Bonus points if sound changes make them hard to recognize as cognates, too. I also sometimes think about the basics of phonology of some important neighboring language, sketch some rules of its phonology, and "borrow" terms into my project.

I guess to put it concisely: don't churn out words; craft them.

[Reyzadren]

Would there be any way to combine animacy-based split-ergative and Austronesian alignments? More specifically, like a combination of Biblaridion's Nekāchti and Tagalog alignments.
It might be a mess since the reason I'm asking here is the fact I can't imagine how is that hypothetic alignment supposed to work, and perhaps even unnaturalistic, but I just wanted to figure out if it was even possible and, if so, likely to be featured on a naturalistic conlang.

Hypothetically, it is possible to combine animacy-based splits and the trigger alignment, and I can easily imagine it, though I don't know anything about Nekāchti or if the combination is naturalistic for you.

[Vlürch]

I guess, as Jackk suggested, do some translating. Start simple (kids' books and the like), and work your way up. That'll give you an idea of what gaps you've got going on.

Translating entire books or even just long paragraphs is honestly something I'd never have the patience for, but I'll definitely check some stuff on Wikisource or whatever and at least look for obvious words that are missing from the conlang.

And what you could do is, since you want etymologies, is come up with multiple words, at least one from each source (Altaic or Uralic) and see which one you like most.

Yeah, that's what I've been doing for a lot of words, although often keeping both as synonyms or near-synonyms.

I'd like to add my approach which might inspire you. I treat the lexicon much the same way I treat phonology or any other part of the language: as an exercise in diachronics. I start from a Proto stage, coining roots for various things, and some derivational affixes. Then I'm combining them and thinking about fun semantic shifts. Bonus points if sound changes make them hard to recognize as cognates, too. I also sometimes think about the basics of phonology of some important neighboring language, sketch some rules of its phonology, and "borrow" terms into my project.

I guess to put it concisely: don't churn out words; craft them.

I've already kind of been doing that, except most of the vocabulary is derived from Proto-Uralic and Proto-Altaic and it's still meant to be some kind of "Ural-Altaic" language with a simple syllable structure and phonology and everything so I can't get too crazy with anything. But yeah, I already have a lot of compounds with somewhat shifted meanings and significant syllabic simplifications.

[Salmoneus]

How can you force yourself to get motivated to come up with uninteresting vocabulary?

Aside from translations, which I agree can be tedious, the reason why my Old Wenthish has hundreds of words, as opposed to a dozen (as most of my conlangs have had) is that I wanted to work out the morphology.

See, Old Wenthish is Germanic, and Germanic has complex paradigms - in particular, lots of different verbal classes. So to see how they worked out (and provide examples), I tried to have words in each class, including words that might be likely to have the sort of phonological structure that might lead to the creation of new subclasses. Then, when I was writing up these words, I in many cases applied some derivations (specifically, prepositional prefixes) to create related words. This gave me hundreds of verbs, and because I was working a priori and picking my words by phonological and morphological characteristics rather than by semantics, this provided a reasonable cross-section of vocabulary.

[Khemehekis]

This gave me hundreds of verbs, and because I was working a priori and picking my words by phonological and morphological characteristics rather than by semantics, this provided a reasonable cross-section of vocabulary.

Don't you mean working a posteriori?

[Salmoneus]

Yes

[Nloki]

Would there be any way to combine animacy-based split-ergative and Austronesian alignments? More specifically, like a combination of Biblaridion's Nekāchti and Tagalog alignments.
It might be a mess since the reason I'm asking here is the fact I can't imagine how is that hypothetic alignment supposed to work, and perhaps even unnaturalistic, but I just wanted to figure out if it was even possible and, if so, likely to be featured on a naturalistic conlang.

Hypothetically, it is possible to combine animacy-based splits and the trigger alignment, and I can easily imagine it, though I don't know anything about Nekāchti or if the combination is naturalistic for you.

I'm mixing up the differences between trigger and austronesian alignments I think.
The following code lines is what I have in mind for it:

Code: Select all

                          TOPIC
  VOICES      Animate                Inanimate
    ↓     Human Non-Human
Agent       -∅-     -ak-             Whatever
Patient
Instrument
Lative
Locative
Adessive
Essive
Comitative
etc.

For example in the sentence Hazë burkhta dakhtsvi "The elder hit my dog" I wouldn't provide any affix for the agent voice since the topical agent itself is a human noun, rather in Burxin hasta njahaksu, "My dog bit the elder" in the same voice, the infix -ak- is added for the sake of emphasizing that the dog, a non-human, has bitten the elder, a human. And I don't even know what to do with inanimates...

I have no clear idea of how is it supposed to work, what should I provide affixation for and what not, so I'm quite confused. When I read that Ayeri swaps affixes between case and voice slots for its trigger alignment system I didn't mean it to be this intrincate... Help please.

[yangfiretiger121]

In general, are the plain bilabial trills /ʙ̥ ʙ/ placed with fricatives, with liquids, or by themselves in a phonology?

[Vlürch]

Aside from translations, which I agree can be tedious, the reason why my Old Wenthish has hundreds of words, as opposed to a dozen (as most of my conlangs have had) is that I wanted to work out the morphology.

See, Old Wenthish is Germanic, and Germanic has complex paradigms - in particular, lots of different verbal classes. So to see how they worked out (and provide examples), I tried to have words in each class, including words that might be likely to have the sort of phonological structure that might lead to the creation of new subclasses. Then, when I was writing up these words, I in many cases applied some derivations (specifically, prepositional prefixes) to create related words. This gave me hundreds of verbs, and because I was working a priori and picking my words by phonological and morphological characteristics rather than by semantics, this provided a reasonable cross-section of vocabulary.

Interesting, and that'd definitely be helpful for a conlang whose morphology has a lot of variety, but for a Standard Average Ural-Altaic language with basically just vowel harmony determining everything, that's not exactly a possibility. But yeah, I've also been picking some Proto-Uralic and Proto-Altaic words because of phonological stuff just so that I could flesh out the sound changes, and that has helped with some of the less interesting vocabulary that I wouldn't have even thought of otherwise.

In general, are the plain bilabial trills /ʙ̥ ʙ/ placed with fricatives, with liquids, or by themselves in a phonology?

If you have other trills and have them as liquids, then I don't see why the bilabial ones wouldn't be as well, considering they're trills. If you have other trills separately as "trills", then I think it'd make most sense to have the bilabial ones grouped together with them. If you don't have any other trills but do have lateral approximants or whatever, then maybe it'd make more sense to have the bilabial trills separately as "trills", but I think that's a matter of preference and/or analysis.

[spanick]

How can you force yourself to get motivated to come up with uninteresting vocabulary?

For the vaguely Ural-Altaic conlang written in Chinese characters, I already have more words than most of my conlangs, but it's still missing a lot of words for "boring" but absolutely necessary things. I can't even pinpoint most of the mundane-and-obvious words that it's missing, but I know they're missing... and I'd prefer to have as much of the necessary vocabulary down before I post the conlang here, especially since it's already my most "complete" conlang so far, so lacking words that should be among the first would be kinda weird.

One method would be to find a mundane word and create other mundane words that are categorically connected to it. So, say you choose ‘bread’ then hunk of other things needed for that: yeast, water, flour, wheat, to grind, to bake, to kneed, etc. I think it’s a little more engaging.

[Reyzadren]

I'm mixing up the differences between trigger and austronesian alignments I think.
The following code lines is what I have in mind for it:

Code: Select all

                          TOPIC
  VOICES      Animate                Inanimate
    ↓     Human Non-Human
Agent       -∅-     -ak-             Whatever
Patient
Instrument
Lative
Locative
Adessive
Essive
Comitative
etc.

For example in the sentence Hazë burkhta dakhtsvi "The elder hit my dog" I wouldn't provide any affix for the agent voice since the topical agent itself is a human noun, rather in Burxin hasta njahaksu, "My dog bit the elder" in the same voice, the infix -ak- is added for the sake of emphasizing that the dog, a non-human, has bitten the elder, a human. And I don't even know what to do with inanimates...

I have no clear idea of how is it supposed to work, what should I provide affixation for and what not, so I'm quite confused. When I read that Ayeri swaps affixes between case and voice slots for its trigger alignment system I didn't mean it to be this intrincate... Help please.

The trigger alignment is the Austronesian alignment. They are the same thing.

There are 2 problems with your description:

1. You are merely using animacy as a gender/class, not as a split. This is a simple thing to resolve, but the bigger problem is number 2.

2. Your sentences are highlighting a focus system, not the trigger alignment. Focuses are independent of triggers, but triggers can take some focusing properties. If that's all your affix is doing, then it's usually not a voice/trigger affix (yet).
[Additional self-check: Can you not use the infix to not emphasise the dog?]

However, this is only the initial assessment. If you provide more examples, perhaps your lang really does exhibit animacy splits with the Austronesian alignment.

Ways to move forward: If you like how animacy works as you showed, then it's not a split; Otherwise, change it to a split. Also, decide if you want to use a focus system or not; If yes, ensure that your focuses are also triggers, because if not then this lang wouldn't have the trigger alignment.

[yangfiretiger121]

In general, are the plain bilabial trills /ʙ̥ ʙ/ placed with fricatives, with liquids, or by themselves in a phonology?

If you have other trills and have them as liquids, then I don't see why the bilabial ones wouldn't be as well, considering they're trills. If you have other trills separately as "trills", then I think it'd make most sense to have the bilabial ones grouped together with them. If you don't have any other trills but do have lateral approximants or whatever, then maybe it'd make more sense to have the bilabial trills separately as "trills", but I think that's a matter of preference and/or analysis.

Okay. It looks like they'll end up on their own in my case because they're the only simple trills when they emerge from the bilabial-alveolar trilled affricates, /p͡r̥ b͡r/. Old Common has a full series of trilled affricates, /p͡r̥ b͡r t͡r̥ d͡r k͡r̥ g͡r/. Currently, I have all of them ending up as non-sibilants, /ɸ β θ̠ ð̠ x ɣ/, in New Common. If I swap to the trills, are /k͡r̥ g͡r/ more likely to remain as is, become /x ɣ/ unconditionally, or become /ʀ̥ ʀ/ unconditionally—leading to [ʀ̥ɛ], etc. because of the velar trill's impossibility?